behind the classics – PlayStation.Bloghttp://blog.us.playstation.com
Official PlayStation Blog for news and video updates on PS4, PS3, PSN, PS Vita, PSPSat, 10 Dec 2016 00:26:18 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.3http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/cropped-PS-Bug-32x32.jpgbehind the classics – PlayStation.Bloghttp://blog.us.playstation.com
3232Behind the Classics: Ratchet & Clankhttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/11/05/behind-the-classics-ratchet-clank/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/11/05/behind-the-classics-ratchet-clank/#commentsMon, 05 Nov 2012 15:01:50 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=89699Behind the Classics series continues with an inside story behind another iconic PlayStation series, this time from celebrated developer Insomniac Games. The Burbank-based studio has produced a slew of memorable PlayStation titles, from the beloved PSone platformer Spyro the Dragon to the soulful PS3 shooter Resistance 3. But in 2002, Insomniac captivated both mainstream and hardcore gamers with the introduction of Ratchet & Clank, a technically peerless shooter-platformer hybrid that radiated style and spunk.
With November 4th marking the 10-year anniversary of Ratchet & Clank's release on PS2, PlayStation.Blog caught up with Ted Price, Insomniac Games' president and CEO, to learn more about how this impactful PlayStation powerhouse came to be. To learn more about the development of this classic series, be sure to check out our recent post that showcases 10 years of concept art.]]>What a treat! PlayStation.Blog’s well-liked Behind the Classics series continues with an inside story behind another iconic PlayStation series, this time from celebrated developer Insomniac Games. The Burbank-based studio has produced a slew of memorable PlayStation titles, from the beloved PSone platformer Spyro the Dragon to the soulful PS3 shooter Resistance 3. But in 2002, Insomniac captivated both mainstream and hardcore gamers with the introduction of Ratchet & Clank, a technically peerless shooter-platformer hybrid that radiated style and spunk.

With November 4th marking the 10-year anniversary of Ratchet & Clank’s release on PS2, PlayStation.Blog caught up with Ted Price, Insomniac Games’ president and CEO, to learn more about how this impactful PlayStation powerhouse came to be. To learn more about the development of this classic series, be sure to check out our recent post that showcases 10 years of concept art.

PlayStation Blog: What was the original base concept for the game?

“He cited Marvin the Martian as inspiration.”

Ted Price, President and CEO, Insomniac Games: After deep-sixing the concept we called “Girl with a Stick,” we had to come up with something else, and we had to do it quickly. Brian Hastings, our chief creative officer, suggested we make a game about a spacefaring alien who has an outlandish arsenal of gadgets and weapons, citing Marvin the Martian as inspiration. That idea clicked with everyone and we all started digging in to flesh out the concept.

PSB: Did you know you were working on something special? What were your creative conditions as you worked on it – uncertainty, confidence, terror?

TP: I don’t think we ever know something is truly special until well after the initial inspiration. Sometimes we get that “Yes, this is working!” feeling early in prototype phase, sometime it hits during production. With Ratchet though, we knew we had something promising when we built a test for Metropolis – one of the first worlds you visit in the game. We had Ratchet running around on platforms looking out over this vast city with streams of airborne traffic whizzing by. You could switch between the “suck cannon,” “pyrocitor,” the wrench and (I think) the blaster. It was a lot of smoke and mirrors because we weren’t using our final engine. We didn’t build out the backs of buildings, you could only travel a few meters in the world, and Ratchet was in his “brown” state, and I don’t recall having any enemies. But it convinced us and Sony of the potential for the game.

PSB: Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?

“What you see is a result of our team having fun.”

TP: We drew from all sorts of sources. Cartoons, sci-fi movies, popular culture… There were certainly some direct playful references to other properties in both the initial concepts and in subsequent games. Captain Qwark was partially inspired by The Tick. Metropolis with its flying cars and city canyons is reminiscent of The Fifth Element. Courtney Gears from Up Your Arsenal was a riff on Britney Spears, who was popular at the time. But these are exceptions rather than the rule: Most of what you see in the games is a direct result of our team just having fun in a universe with very few constraints.

PSB: It was an ambitious title for its time. What were the biggest challenges in realizing your original vision?
TP: Controlling scope was (and still is) our biggest challenge. We were moving onto a new platform with a new IP and we had very little time to get it done. We knew we needed to be ambitious for the game to stand out. But we also knew that if we spread ourselves too thin with too many features, the game would be half-baked. Dealing with this conundrum hasn’t gotten any easier over the years because players’ expectations continue to skyrocket for all platforms.

PSB: How close to your original concept was the finished game?
TP: It depends. Some of us consider “Girl with a Stick” as an important part of the Ratchet genesis, and Ratchet & Clank does owe some its mechanics and ideas to that concept. With that in mind, both Ratchet and Resistance went through drastic changes on their way to their final incarnations. However, once we had Ratchet up and running on the PS2, the changes were less severe. Ratchet did change in appearance along the way. When I look back at the original model versus what ended up in the final game, I see a big difference. We also continued to add mechanics to the game as we figured out what worked and what didn’t.

“We were yearning to jump back into the realm of oversized, overpowered weapons.”

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of?
TP: The crazy weapons! Coming off of Spyro, a series where the main character couldn’t use weapons other than his breath and his horns. I think a lot of us were yearning to jump into back into the realm of oversized, overpowered projectile weapons. We spent some time in that world with Disruptor but took a four-year break while focusing on purple quadrupeds with Spyro. We also latched onto weapons as a way to separate Ratchet from other platformers, which seemed perennially tied to bonking, bouncing, and punching. Finally, in my opinion, creating weapons without any real-world rules gave us a chance to operate at max creativity –- which is ultimately the goal for a lot of us in this industry. It really didn’t matter WHAT the weapon was, as long as it was satisfying and fun to use we knew we’d be able to make it fit.

PSB: How would you like Ratchet & Clank to be remembered? What did it bring to the video game medium?
TP: Ratchet is still alive and well, with Full Frontal Assault coming out in a few weeks. A lot of us at Insomniac are very proud that Ratchet & Clank is one of the last platformers standing and still going strong. And we all like to think that Ratchet has contributed to the evolution of platformers and action games in general over the last decade and a half. As a minor example, seeing radial quick-select menus in other games is a compliment to us because I think Ratchet was the first to have one (though I could be wrong). And I’m still waiting to see a sheepinator in another game. To be fair though, I think Heretic (1994) and Hexen (1995) were the first games to have weapons which turned enemies into farm animals!

PSB: Which of the Ratchet & Clank characters is closest to your heart?
TP: Captain Qwark. I love him because he’s always larger than life, always 100% sure of himself, and usually wrong. My wife tells me she knows people like that. Still trying to figure out who she’s talking about.

More Behind the Classics

]]>http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/11/05/behind-the-classics-ratchet-clank/feed/26http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Lead_rat.jpg3.85Director, SIEA Social Media260Behind the Classics: Syphon Filterhttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/10/25/behind-the-classics-syphon-filter/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/10/25/behind-the-classics-syphon-filter/#commentsThu, 25 Oct 2012 15:00:40 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=88593Sly Cooper to Assassin's Creed.
Syphon Filter veered closer to the action-adventure end of this spectrum, though it too left a distinct mark on the genre with its more realistic approach to combat. Enemies ducked for cover behind objects, an array of memorable gadgets gave players more combat choice, and headshots dropped most combatants instantly. Syphon Filter's high-stakes story was also a sign of things to come in videogame design, merging contemporary themes (programmable viruses, shadowy terrorist networks) with a globe-trotting super spy in protagonist Gabe Logan.]]>

It’s easy to forget that “tactical espionage action” is a relatively recent innovation in the videogame medium, with trailblazers like Metal Gear Solid and Syphon Filter emerging in the late ’90s to great acclaim and even greater influence. A more realistic, open-ended philosophy towards combat soon spread through the action genre, permanently impacting the development of artificial intelligence, level design, and narrative — ultimately paving the way for everything from Sly Cooper to Assassin’s Creed.

Syphon Filter veered closer to the action-adventure end of this spectrum, though it too left a distinct mark on the genre with its more realistic approach to combat. Enemies ducked for cover behind objects, an array of memorable gadgets gave players more combat choice, and headshots dropped most combatants instantly. Syphon Filter’s high-stakes story was also a sign of things to come in videogame design, merging contemporary themes (programmable viruses, shadowy terrorist networks) with a globe-trotting super spy in protagonist Gabe Logan.

PlayStation.Blog: What was the original base concept for the game? Was it in any way a response to Metal Gear Solid, or did the idea develop in a relative vacuum?
John Garvin, Creative Director at Bend Studio: Metal Gear Solid actually had nothing to do with the genesis of Syphon Filter. We had been in development for quite a while before we had even heard of it. The idea originally came from a producer at Sony’s (then) 989 Studios who had written a one page synopsis that he called “Syphon Filter” which had zero meaning, i.e. there was no plot, no character, and no story, just an idea for settings, mechanics and gameplay. From the beginning it was to be a “stealth action” game (in the days before there was such a genre) that focused heavily on weapons, gadgets and stealth. Our goal was to make the player feel like a super spy. Our lead designer back then was pretty heavily influenced by Nintendo’s GoldenEye, which was probably the closest you could come to finding a game like Syphon in those days.

PSB: Did you know you were working on something special? What were your creative conditions as you worked on it – uncertainty, confidence, terror?

“Syphon Filter went through a few rough patches and came close to being canceled several times”

JG: Mostly terror. It was a hard project in terms of development, for a lot of reasons. There were no, or few, games that we could draw on for inspiration. Most of the team had zero experience making this kind of game: The guys at Eidetic had just made Bubsy 3D, so they had some experience with doing a third-person action game, but Bubsy was a cartoon platformer so it wasn’t much help; I was brought on after the first Syphon Filter prototype was underway (a simple shooting segment in a subway), but my experience to that point was directing strategy games like MissionForce: Cyberstorm and art directing games like Sega CD’s Bouncers. None of us knew anything about making realistic shooters set in a spy world.

The first Syphon Filter went through a few rough patches and came close to being canceled several times as we missed deadlines, revamped mechanics, swapped levels around, changed the story, and generally tried to figure out what the heck we were doing. Our producer at 989, Connie Booth, and her boss Kelly Flock, were great though showing great faith in this new “spy genre” game. Our team ended up working in crunch mode for about a year as we tried to get the game up to everyone’s standards.

We didn’t know we had something special until after we shipped and sales took off like crazy, surpassing everyone’s expectations. I think we sold over a million units that first year. It was amazing. Players seemed to really appreciate doing something new — sneaking around, fighting terrorists while dodging subway cars, shooting a taser halfway down a city block and making a terrorist burst into flame. Things players had never before experienced. This kind of thing may be common now, but back then it was still all pretty new.

PSB: Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?
JG: Mostly my own experience. A lot of games these days are going for a dark, gritty, monochromatic look, but the games I remember playing in the late 1990s were all pretty colorful and weren’t all that realistic. Look at screens from Unreal, Turok 2, or Rainbow Six, which were realistic but had a palette that seemed all over the place. I remember being really inspired by Saving Private Ryan – which came out in 1998 I think – and Half Life.

PSB: It was an ambitious title for its time. What were the biggest challenges in realizing your original vision?
JG: It wasn’t really about realizing our original vision, because we were making it up as we went. We knew we wanted a third-person action game, and we knew we wanted to deliver on the fantasy of being a super spy. For us that meant even if something was “janky,” we’d do it if it could help sell the fantasy. For example, our rendered movies were pretty low budget. We didn’t even have articulated fingers. All our characters had “box” hands, but that didn’t stop us from having rendered movies because we had a story we wanted to tell. Our motto was that “bad movies are better than no movies.” Same thing went for game play sequences. We had a set-up where Gabe, the super spy star of the game, had to wear a tuxedo and infiltrate a black-tie event to spy on someone. Today that whole sequence would be very expensive, requiring sets, extras, costumes, and lots of mocap and animation; back then we just palette swapped some of our NPCs and did some very low budget animation of them standing around drinking cocktails. Once the game started, the player could hear a looping sound of the party, but couldn’t actually go back to the room where the party was being held. This kind of thing probably wouldn’t fly today, but we did all sorts of shortcuts back then to increase the scope of the experience without worrying about how polished it was. It was all about the game.

PSB: How close to your original concept was the finished game?
JG: Syphon Filter just wasn’t developed that way. The original concept of the player becoming a super spy was adhered to pretty closely, but everything else was worked out as we developed. A crazy way to make a game, but a process we made work because our team was only about 13 people. Here’s some examples: the story for Syphon Filter when I was brought on board was all about a group of scientists who had been kidnapped and taken to a huge underground complex where they were being forced to build a time machine by an evil scientist / government. I was hired to be the art director, but I began to offer ways to improve the story to make it more current, more relevant (I had been the art director, writer and designer on my projects at Dynamix, my previous game company). The studio directors liked my ideas and midway through development I rewrote the entire thing, coming up with the idea that the phrase “Syphon Filter” actually was a code word for a deadly “programmable” virus. None of that stuff was new, science fiction and film had explored ideas like these for years, but it was new to games.

“Midway through development I rewrote the entire thing”

We were shuffling levels around as late as weeks before we shipped in order to help pacing and flow issues. We changed locations and concepts mid-stream: the Girdeux boss fight was originally going to happen in a parking lot near the par, but I remember thinking at the time how hard it was going to be to build all those cars, and the challenge of “fencing” the player’s movement in an open space like a parking lot…and, could our engine even pull it off? So I went home over the weekend and built the “memorial” room, including downloading and chopping up that huge mural that ringed the wall of the space. It was a pretty big hit and was something we could pull off.

It really wasn’t until the sequel that we had a vision for the game. The entire team was given a week off and the game’s co-creator, Richard Ham, and I were sent off to write up a script for Syphon Filter 2. I think I spent a weekend and wrote the entire screenplay. Rich and I got together and he helped revise the second half of the game, introducing all the Moscow stuff, making the end of the story more espionage-like and exciting. When the team came back, we spent the next year building exactly what we had written. That was the first time that we had a vision up front, which we followed until the end.

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of?
JG: I’m personally most proud of the story elements. In those days you didn’t see video games dealing with a lot of current topics (bio weapons, terrorism, secret government agencies working outside the law). Remember this was all pre-9/11. And we were doing some things with characters that you didn’t see often in video games: Teresa Lipan, the brains of the agency, was an American Indian female… Lawrence Mujari, the biologist, was an African-American male, Lian Xing, a Chinese female, and so on. We were making a real effort to make the characters as diverse and un-stereotypical as possible. We were also attempting to inject a higher level of realism into the game than we’d seen before.

“Oh, and the taser. We all really loved the taser.”

Often in game development (even today), you’ll hear “Who cares? It’s just a game!” That kind of thinking really bugged me. I wanted characters to have real motivations, level objectives to make sense and fit into a story arc, locations to feel real and have accurate details. And we did some crazy things story-wise that we might not be able to get away with now. For example (spoiler!), at one point in the game Gabe is rescuing and inoculating test subjects, only Gabe finds out later that he was actually killing them because the vaccine was really a poison. And scientists would run up to Gabe and surrender, and we sort of forced him to shoot unarmed men in the head (well, they were evil scientists after all). Having terrorists blow up a subway in Washington DC — think we could get away with that now? Again, this might all seem pretty tame by today’s standards, but in 1999 it was pretty startling to be doing this kind of stuff in a console game. Oh, and the taser. We all really loved the taser.

PSB: How would you like Syphon Filter to be remembered? What did it bring to the video game medium?
JG: For what it was: the first of its kind, a mix of stealth and action, using real-world, current story elements and settings, realistic weapons and gadgets, with edgy story elements. As anyone in game development knows it’s really hard to be original, to come up with new ideas, new mechanics and new ways of playing. Syphon did all that and spawned a genre; so many games came out after us and were variations on the theme. In many ways, we were there first.

PSB: Which of the Syphon Filter characters is closest to your heart?
JG: From the first Syphon Filter, it’s gotta be the man himself, Gabe Logan. The way John Chacon read his lines is, well, unique to say the least. Gabe sort of embodied the concept of the stoic action hero… with a heart. I like Mara Aramov, too. How can you not like that laugh (which was the last thing you heard in the first three games)? In the later games, I would have chosen Teresa Lipan or maybe Stone, but yeah, there’s no one like Gabe Logan.

Ah, Soul Reaver. I remember it well! This gruesome little gem made quite the splash when it landed on PSone in 1999. As the wounded, ostracized vampire Raziel, your goal was to avenge yourself against the corrupt vampire lord Kain and restore balance to the decaying world of Nosgoth. I particularly remember the game’s inspired approach to combat; your vampiric foes couldn’t be killed by ordinary means, so after weakening them with hand-to-hand combat you had to hurl their broken bodies onto a sharp stake or into a patch of sunlight to finish them off. The level design was also a knockout, as Raziel was able to phase-shift into a spectral realm in order to bypass obstacles or solve puzzles.

But above all else, Soul Reaver is remembered for its story and characters. And we have the game’s director Amy Hennig to thank for that! As you’re probably well aware, Hennig later joined celebrated PlayStation developer Naughty Dog, serving as creative director and writer for Jak and Daxter and all three UNCHARTED titles.

Hennig graciously took the time to share her memories of Soul Reaver’s development, including some never-before-revealed insight into the game’s origins. Read on for the full story straight from Hennig, and be sure to leave your favorite Soul Reaver moments in the comments.

PlayStation Blog: What was the original concept for the game?

Amy Hennig, Director and Writer of Soul Reaver: I don’t know how many people know this, but initially, it wasn’t actually a sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain at all – our original proposal was a concept for a new IP we named “Shifter,” loosely inspired by Paradise Lost. The protagonist was essentially a fallen angel of death, a reaper of souls hunted by his former brethren, and now driven to expose and destroy the false god they all served.

The Shifter concept was the genesis of the game that would become Soul Reaver; the core ideas were all there. The hero was an undead creature, able to shift between the spectral and material realms, and glide on the tattered remains of his wing-like coattails. We conceived the spirit realm as a twisted, expressionistic version of the physical world. The hero was bent on revenge after being betrayed and cast down by his creator – like Raziel, he was a dark savior figure, chosen to restore balance to a blighted, dystopian world.

When we were asked to adapt this concept into a sequel to Blood Omen, our challenge was to take all these ideas and merge them creatively into the Legacy of Kain mythos.

PSB: Did you know you were working on something special? What were your creative conditions as you worked on it – uncertainty, confidence, terror?

AH: You’re never really sure when you’re in the middle of a project. Because we were initially such a small team, we were able to work under the radar for a while, and this allowed us to tinker with some unusual ideas that might not have survived premature scrutiny or skepticism.

When we first shared the concept with our colleagues in the company, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea but also justifiable concern that we might be taking on an unrealistic number of technical risks. We pared back on some secondary features – we had originally planned to include shape-shifting (morphing) as well as plane-shifting, for instance – so we could focus on elements that were more critical to our core concept. By the time we unveiled the game to the press, we were starting to get the feeling that we might be onto something special.

As far as the creative conditions went – we were very invested in our original Shifter idea, so it naturally caused a bit of consternation when we were first asked to adapt the concept to be a Blood Omen sequel. But creative constraints can be inspiring and invigorating, and once we dug into the challenge, the concept evolved in all kinds of exciting ways.

We definitely had set ourselves a lot of ambitious technical goals, though – so, yes, there was a fair amount of uncertainty and terror about what we were undertaking!

PSB: Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s thematic elements, characters, or dialog?

AH: There were so many different inspirations, it’s hard to just name a few…
As I mentioned earlier, the original idea was very loosely inspired by the rebellious angels of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The spiritual structure of the world was based on the philosophy of Gnosticism, the belief that the cosmos is ruled by a malevolent “pretender” god, that humans are prisoners in a spiritual lie, and that mankind’s struggle is a fight for free will in the face of seemingly insurmountable Fate.

We wanted to give Nosgoth’s dystopian future a decaying 19th-century industrial aesthetic, while the look of the spectral realm was inspired by the twisted architecture and disorienting angles of 1920s German Expressionist cinema.

Regarding the dialogue, we obviously took a cue from Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, with its florid language and ornate monologues. We wanted to carry a similar style into the sequels. I also drew inspiration from the dense, literate dialogue of historical dramas like A Man for All Seasons, Becket, and A Lion in Winter.

PSB: It was an ambitious title for its time. What were the biggest challenges in realizing your original vision?

AH: Our biggest challenge, hands-down, was getting the data-streaming working, to allow us to have a seamless, interconnected world with no load events. I think we were one of the first developers to tackle this problem (along with Naughty Dog, on Crash Bandicoot). It proved to be way more difficult than we had initially anticipated – if I recall, we were still struggling to get the textures to dynamically pack correctly, just a couple months before release. We ultimately got it working by the skin of our teeth, but I wonder if we would’ve embarked on such an ambitious plan if we’d known how difficult it was going to be!

Our second challenge, of course, was figuring out how to store two sets of data for the spectral and material realms, and how to implement the real-time morph between the two environments. Our initial plan was over-ambitious, involving texture-morphing as well as geometry-morphing, but we realized pretty early on that our texture memory (and time) was too limited to achieve this. We came up with the idea of leveraging the 3DS Max animation timeline to attach spectral values to the vertices in the geometry – i.e., frame 0 was the material world, and frame 1 was the spectral realm (or vice versa; I can’t remember for sure). This way we could alter the x,y,z coordinates of each vertex, as well as its RGB lighting values, to create a twisted, more eerily lit version of the physical realm.

Our ultimate challenge, though, was schedule and scope. Conceived as an open-world, Zelda-esque 3D adventure game, Soul Reaver was incredibly ambitious. Crystal Dynamics’ Gex engine gave us a leg-up on the 3D technology, but in essence we were writing a game engine from scratch, while developing a new IP. These days, a developer wouldn’t think of attempting such a thing in less than three years (minimum), but Eidos wanted the game in less than two. In the end, we shipped Soul Reaver in under 2.5 years, but not without some unfortunate eleventh-hour cuts which still pain me today. The scope of the game was definitely too ambitious, but if we had shipped the game that Fall, instead of that Summer, I think we could have reduced the scope of the game more elegantly.

PSB: How close to your original concept was the finished game?

AH: Pretty close, considering all the changes we went through over the course of development. We had to cut content, but the core concept of the game remained unchanged (even going back to the original Shifter proposal).

To hit the August ’99 release date, we had to cut the last few levels of the game, and end on a cliffhanger that set up Soul Reaver 2. Originally, Raziel was going to hunt down and destroy all of his former brothers as well as Kain – and then, using his newly-acquired abilities, he would’ve activated the long-dormant pipes of the Silenced Cathedral to wipe out the remaining vampires of Nosgoth with a sonic blast. Only then would he realize that he’d been the Elder God’s pawn all along, that the purging of the vampires had devastating consequences, and that the only way to set things right would be to use Moebius’ time-streaming device to go back in time and alter history (in the sequel).

So the story would have arrived at a similar place, just by a different route. In the end, as much as I hated its bluntness, Soul Reaver’s “To Be Continued” ending probably turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I think it opened up more interesting story options for the sequels.

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of?

AH: I’m extremely proud of how our relatively small team managed to pull off all those groundbreaking technical challenges. And as a designer, I still take pride in the originality of Soul Reaver’s vision, and the unified way we were able to mesh the game mechanics with the fiction – e.g., devouring souls for sustenance, and the way the spectral plane was integrated into the health system; how the combat mechanics were designed around defeating immortal vampires; the ability to glide on broken wings; and the balance between Raziel’s mechanics in the spirit and material realms, especially the ability to use the morphing terrain to your advantage. In many ways, I think it’s still the most well-designed game I’ve worked on.

PSB: How would you like Soul Reaver to be remembered? What did it bring to the video game medium?

AH: Fondly, I hope! Even thirteen years later, I’m humbled and gratified to have fans and colleagues come up to me and say how memorable the game was for them, or how it influenced them as young game designers. The series still has an enthusiastic fan base, and is remembered affectionately in ways we couldn’t have foreseen all those years ago.

I hope it’s remembered as a well-constructed game with an original vision and an engaging story, and as groundbreaking in terms of what we were able to achieve on the PlayStation at the time. Our approach to voice acting and performance was also innovative for the time, the way we brought the actors in to record their dialogue together rather than in isolation. The performance capture process we use on Uncharted today – where we involve the actors as collaborators, and have them play the scenes together on the stage – owes its origins to the techniques we established for Soul Reaver fifteen years ago.

PSB: Which of the Soul Reaver characters is closest to your heart?

AH: It’s impossible for me to choose between Raziel and Kain – they’re two inseparable sides of the same coin (so to speak). As a character, I probably like Kain more. Although ostensibly a villain, he’s really a classic hero, fighting for free will in a world shackled by Fate. Raziel is a more tragic figure, a pawn, and that makes him sympathetic – but he’s also a deeply flawed character, blinded by self-righteousness and vengeance. I loved writing for both of them.

More Behind the Classics

]]>http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/10/12/behind-the-classics-amy-hennig-talks-soul-reaver-secrets/feed/80http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/LEAD_Soul.jpg4.53Director, SIEA Social Media800Behind The Classics – Oddworld: Abe’s Oddyseehttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/09/28/behind-the-classics-oddworld-abes-oddysee/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/09/28/behind-the-classics-oddworld-abes-oddysee/#commentsFri, 28 Sep 2012 15:00:19 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=86116This week’s instalment in our ongoing Behind The Classics series takes us to the weird and wonderful land of Oddworld. It might not have sold 20 million copies, but few games released in the PlayStation era have such a loyal following as Abe’s Oddysee and its sequels. And with good reason – Lorne Lanning’s beautiful side-scrolling fantasy adventure is one of the richest, most singular game worlds ever created and its hero, Abe, one of gaming’s most eccentric protagonists.

With an HD remake currently in development, we caught up with the game’s creator to find out how the 1997 original came into being. Sit back and enjoy – and if you’re new to the title remember that it’s available to download on PSN.

Fred Dutton, PlayStation.Blog Europe Manager: What was the original concept for the game?
Lorne Lanning, President, Oddworld Inhabitants: On a very practical level, we were striving for a deeper and more engaging sense of story and emotional character development for games. We brought character development, production design, animation, and effects from the film industry. We wanted to feel like you were playing not just a challenge, but someone’s fate – someone that you had to be responsible for.

On a more philosophical level, I wanted to take the most pop of pop culture, and convert it into meaningful modern day myths that would have great appeal to a wider audience. We also believed that people could find more empowering messages through gaming. So we targeted the anti-hero as our main character. Abe wasn’t the muscle-bound superhero that you wanted to be – he was the rather pathetic chump that you actually are. It was about rendering the journey out of the more powerless beings that we see ourselves as and at the place we most typically are, which is at the bottom of the global corporate food chain.

On a business level, we believed that if we could crack the conceptual goals mentioned above, then we had a chance at establishing a quality brand that distinguished itself by offering its audience a more intelligent – albeit sarcastically ironic – perspective to engage with.

At the time, we believed that the space was wide open to create a brand of quality and integrity around the dysfunctional cracked mirror of our real world as reflected into our mythically hilarious and pathetic world, then we could establish a brand that would stick into the future.

PSB: Where did you look for inspiration when deciding on the game’s look and feel?
LL: While 3D was the big emerging new real time tech of the PS1 era, it didn’t appeal to me at all as I had already been dealing with 3D graphics for a decade before I talked Sherry McKenna into founding Oddworld with me. We knew very well the capabilities that 3D was not going to deliver for console gaming at that time. Instead, we focused on creating the lifelike aspects of the characters and environments. Their animations, their sound effects – we were aiming for it to feel more like film.

It was film that was the key inspiration, but from games the most fun I personally had, aside from pure racing and arcade-style games, was the great early side-scrollers like Prince of Persia, Out of This World and Flashback. I loved those games, but most importantly those games made me feel like I was controlling a lifeform more than a piece of art in some challenge contest.

The animations, the locked camera, the movie-esque tone and vibe of those games blending story, action and adventure in clever, focused ways engaged me in ways that I found more inspiring.

So while most developers were heading for 3D, we were heading for deeper characters and more emotionally meaningful play. For me, it was not about the tech. It was about the narrative and having the gameplay take some interesting new twists to make the mechanics of challenge more tightly interwoven into the character and story.

PSB: It really set the standard for 2D visuals when it was released. Was it a tough game to develop?
LL: It was hell. We had all kinds of things going wrong, and quite frankly it would have failed to reach the shelf had Sherry McKenna not been one seriously badass negotiator and strategist. The team stuck through some hard times and people wanted to do a great job with the project, but Sherry was the enabler to make all that happen. She kept the money flowing while other companies were being cut.

Considering the obstacles, it was harder than I ever imagined it would be. Logically speaking, we should have failed, but our deep commitment and our absolute determination under the leadership of a relentlessly optimistic force – aka Sherry – we actually prevailed. But it was a killer building the company, an engine, and the game all with one budget. It was painful.

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of, and which element, if any, do you feel fell short? Any regrets about the checkpoint system?
LL: Well, yeah, the checkpoint system was such a cluster**** it was maddening. This was down to coding issues and having a very challenging time getting code and design and direction on the same page. It was a new company, it was new people working together, it was a crazy ambitious effort for us… and we completely screwed the save system by release. UGH! It hurt, but we shipped and while it was imperfect we swore we wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. We fixed that issue on Abe’s Exoddus and even created the “quick save” to really drill that issue home that we would never make that mistake again.

PSB: What do you see as the game’s legacy? How would you like it remembered?
LL: I think the game served a lot of people who wanted to see deeper and more developed characters in games that had more real world relevance to them. I believed, and still do, that the audience wants richer entertainment than they are currently getting.

I also hear a lot of people in the business claim the game inspired them to want to start making games. But I have to say the most intangible rewards were the heart-breaking and inspiring fan mails from people whose lives the game so deeply affected. It’s uncanny the impact the game had on some people, but it was why I personally wanted to make the games.

I believed the power of the medium could have greater and more nutritious impact that added something to people’s lives and perspectives on the high-jinxed world around them, full of lies and deception being brought to them by governments and corporations.

There was one fan who swears the game saved his life, who was actually a 72 year old man who we decided to name a character after in our second game, Abe’s Exoddus. He was Alf Gamble. When we read his hand written multi-paged letter… all of us cried. It was a killer, it was sincere, and it was a heartbreaker.

More Behind the Classics

]]>http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/09/28/behind-the-classics-oddworld-abes-oddysee/feed/26http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/oddworld.jpg4.19SCEE Blog Manager260Behind the Classics: MediEvilhttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/09/07/behind-the-classics-medievil/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/09/07/behind-the-classics-medievil/#commentsFri, 07 Sep 2012 14:00:24 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=84378Behind the Classics series is a real lost gem – SCE Cambridge Studios’ wild, wacky supernatural adventure MediEvil. First released on PSone back in 1998, it put you in the shoes of Sir Daniel Fortesque – an undead knight unwittingly reanimated by the evil sorcerer Zarok who embarks on a quest to liberate the kingdom of Gallowmere.
A sequel followed in 2000, with a PSP remake also popping up on PSP in 2005, however, it’s the original game that remains most embedded in the memory. With Sir Dan soon to enjoy a comeback of sorts as a playable character in PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale, we sat down with original designer Chris Sorrell to find out more about the game’s development.]]>

The second entry in our Behind the Classics series is a real lost gem – SCE Cambridge Studios’ wild, wacky supernatural adventure MediEvil. First released on PSone back in 1998, it put you in the shoes of Sir Daniel Fortesque – an undead knight unwittingly reanimated by the evil sorcerer Zarok who embarks on a quest to liberate the kingdom of Gallowmere.

A sequel followed in 2000, with a PSP remake also popping up on PSP in 2005, however, it’s the original game that remains most embedded in the memory. With Sir Dan soon to enjoy a comeback of sorts as a playable character in PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale, we sat down with original designer Chris Sorrell to find out more about the game’s development.

PlayStation.Blog: What was the original concept for the game? Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?Chris Sorrell, Game Designer, MediEvil: The first design proposal for the game had the working title ‘Dead Man Dan’ and described a game that was a fusion of Capcom’s Ghouls’n Ghosts with the art style of Tim Burton – especially the look and feel of The Nightmare Before Christmas. In both cases these were things that I was a huge fan of back in the mid ‘90s. Lead artist Jason Wilson shared my interest in dark, gothic influenced artwork and we worked together to define the look and feel of the game.

PSB: It was an ambitious title for its time – what were your biggest challenges in realising that original vision?CS: MediEvil presented a real mountain of challenges. The game started life as a project of a small, cash-strapped independent developer – Millennium Interactive. In addition to bringing together a brand new team – none of whom had really made a 3D game of this scale before – we were in ‘sell’ mode almost from day one, with the future of the studio riding on our ability to attract a major publishing deal as quickly as possible. We were initially working on multiple platforms including Windows and Sega Saturn as well as PlayStation before we finally had the chance to demo the game for Sony. Thankfully that was probably our best pitch ever: SCEE had some really inspiring people in management, they loved MediEvil, and within a few weeks we were signed to make an exclusive PlayStation game. In a few more months we became Sony’s second studio in the UK.

Of course another layer of challenge came from the fact that, like most other developers at that time, we were still feeling our way with 3D. Things like camera and character control presented a lot of interesting new challenges and required us to try out a number of approaches before we settled on solutions that seemed to work.

PSB: How close to your original concept was the finished game?CS: Actually really close. Over the course of development the game became less arcadey and a little more of an adventure – which, being a huge Zelda fan, I was very pleased about. As for the game’s look, I think that was extremely true to our initial goals as you can see if you track down some of the concept art that’s out there on the internet.

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of, and which element, if any, do you feel fell short?CS: At the time I might have said I was most proud of how our team pulled together to finish the game without compromising on the quirky attention to detail or scope of the game. Looking back now, I guess I feel most proud of the fact that we managed to create a game which – and I believe this is down to the game’s personality and charm – a lot of people still seem to remember. As a developer, it’s a real privilege to be told that your game brings back fond childhood memories for someone and that seems to happen quite often with MediEvil.

Where do I feel we fell short? Well I would have liked to travel a little further down that ‘Zelda’ path – I think a genuine, deep adventure set in the MediEvil world could have been something quite special. The game was also supposed to feature Morten the Earthworm – who lived in Dan’s empty eye socket. Alas, he didn’t make the cut.

PSB: What do you see as the game’s legacy? How would you like it remembered?CS: Certainly I think we were one of the first games to capture that Tim Burton vibe and I think there may have been a few spooky themed action games that followed MediEvil where the developers probably looked at what we had done. [2002 Capcom fantasy adventure] Maximo springs to mind. I’d be quite happy if people remembered MediEvil as ‘that game with the weird, grunting skeleton dude with one eye and no lower jaw who throws his own arm like a boomerang’.

PSB: A PSP version came out in 2005, but the series has been largely dormant since. Do you ever think about where you might have taken the franchise?CS: I’d certainly love to work with Sir Dan one more time and I have lots of ideas that I think would make for a great new MediEvil game. Sadly I think it’s an unlikely prospect since I no longer work for Sony, not to mention how times have changed in the years since Dan first left his crypt.

More Behind the Classics

]]>http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/09/07/behind-the-classics-medievil/feed/48http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/medievil.jpg4.44SCEE Blog Manager480Behind the Classics: Jak & Daxterhttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/08/24/behind-the-classics-jak-daxter/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/08/24/behind-the-classics-jak-daxter/#commentsFri, 24 Aug 2012 15:08:57 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=83285Behind The Classics. Every fortnight (well, that’s the plan at least), we’ll be talking to the creative force behind a vintage PS One or PlayStation 2 title. To kick things off, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin was kind enough to lend us his time to discuss the making of seminal 2001 PS2 platformer Jak & Daxter.
We’ve got the next few entries in the series lined up, but please feel free to leave your suggestions for future interview subjects below. Manage your expectations – these people aren’t always easy to track down – but we’ll do our best.]]>

When I took over the SCEE PlayStation Blog a month or two back, I promised you a few new regular features. Today, I’m happy to unveil the first of them: Behind The Classics. Every fortnight (well, that’s the plan at least), we’ll be talking to the creative force behind a vintage PS One or PlayStation 2 title. To kick things off, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin was kind enough to lend us his time to discuss the making of seminal 2001 PS2 platformer Jak & Daxter.

We’ve got the next few entries in the series lined up, but please feel free to leave your suggestions for future interview subjects below. Manage your expectations – these people aren’t always easy to track down – but we’ll do our best.

Anyway, without further ado, over to Andy…

What was the original concept for the game? Was it a deliberate attempt to create a PlayStation 2 mascot to rival Crash Bandicoot?
Andy Gavin: Of course we wanted the franchise to be as big – or bigger – than Crash. And while this didn’t quite come to be, it was certainly our goal.

The formulation of new game ideas involves two aspects: genre and style. As to gameplay genre: on the PS One, good-looking, free roaming 3D seemed impossible. The machine lacked any hardware sorting or clipping, and had a relatively low polygon count. Plus, the AI challenge of creating a camera that didn’t leave players feeling queasy was extremely daunting. So we locked down the viewpoint to improve graphics and focus on traditional Donkey Kong Country-style gameplay.

But with Mario 64, Miyamoto showed that free roaming was possible, albeit on the N64 and with no small dose of camera frustration. By the time we began Jak & Daxter in January 1999 newer games like Banjo-Kajooie vastly improved the playability. Clearly, on the PS2, full 3D could be great.

Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?
Andy Gavin: With Crash we enjoyed enormous worldwide success in no small part due to our collaboration with Sony’s worldwide producers. So for Jak & Daxter we set out to create a character and environment that merged elements from worldwide cultures. You can see the result in Jak, who is a hybrid of Western cartoons and Eastern manga. We asked every Naughty Dog artist to spend a couple of days sketching concepts for the look of the game. We threw these on a giant table and picked elements we liked as a group.

It was an ambitious title for its time. What were the biggest challenges in realising your original vision?
Andy Gavin: Like every first-on-a-system Naughty Dog game, Jak had a rocky development. First of all, the PS2 was difficult to program, particularly in those early days when no workable examples or libraries existed. On top of that, I made the audacious choice to write the entire game in a programming language of my own design called GOAL, creating a brand new compiler and debugger from scratch. In addition, to realise the ambitious graphical goals, we invented a roster of brand new technologies: several different level of detail systems, perhaps 10 rendering engines, seamless loading from DVD, advanced runtime physics and joint animation systems to rival the offline tools. It was really, really crazy and basically took us about 20 months just on the engineering side before the engine was able to produce the kind of levels we wanted.

Can you tell me more about the mooted third character and why it was axed?
Andy Gavin: There never were any serious plans for a third character. But we had more ambitious plans for Daxter in the beginning. He was supposed to be able to hop off your shoulder and run around and do stuff. That didn’t happen until the second game. Same with the vehicle stuff. We squeezed the racer in, but barely, and we had much more aggressive plans for it.

How close to your original concept was the finished game?
Andy Gavin: Very close. We wanted to put you into this beautiful, fully-rendered fantasy world and yet allow full interactive exploration. We wanted no loading, elaborate storytelling, a camera you didn’t need to manually control, and both classic platform and vehicle gameplay.

Which element of the game are you most proud of?
Andy Gavin: I’m both most proud and most torn over GOAL, my custom language and development environment. This ended up being so much harder than I thought, and is certainly the most sophisticated programming I’ve done in my career. In the end it was pretty awesome, although not without its quirks. I’m also supremely proud of our completely load-free seamless-world. We were the first to do this – I even have a patent on it – and few have attempted it since. It was a lot of work!

And let’s not forget Jak’s control, which I personally programed. Jak has really good control, as good as any game ever. His animation is incredibly fluid, yet he is supremely responsive to both the player and the environment. Even basic elements of his control system were written and re-written a dozen times.

How would you like the first Jak & Daxter to be remembered? What did it bring to the video game medium?
Andy Gavin: The single most important thing that it brought to the medium – and there are countless smaller things – is its consistent and complete integration of the game and story elements. This comes to full fruition in Jak 2, and continues peerlessly today in newer Naughty Dog games like Uncharted. Jak has a detailed and involved story, but it’s never a semi-interactive movie, it’s a video game! The storytelling does not come at the expense of the gameplay.

Which of Naughty Dog’s PlayStation characters – Crash, Jak & Daxter, or Nathan Drake – is closest to your heart?
Andy Gavin: Crash and Neo Cortex are my favorites, and I also have a really big sweet spot for Daxter, who is such a hoot. The Uncharted characters are awesome too, but I can’t take any responsibility for them, so the connection isn’t as personal. And don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, even back to the forgotten ones like Keef the Thief, but really Crash’s wicked orange grin melts my heart, and Cortex is who I secretly wanted to be… If I were a cartoon :-)